Opposing Abortion To Protect Women. Carol Woman

Carol Mason
Opposing Abortion to Protect Women:

Transnational Strategy since the 1990s
T his article examines the transnational work that since the 1990s has in-
creasingly opposed abortion in terms of protecting women. Two recent
books detail the women-centric work of antiabortion efforts, but they
fall short of examining how such politics reflect or contribute to the global
rise of the Right, which also has deployed pro-woman stances strategically.
Karissa Haugeberg’s Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Re-
form Movement of the Twentieth Century (2017) and Paul Saurette and
Kelly Gordon’s The Changing Voice of the Anti-abortion Movement: The
Rise of “Pro-Woman” Rhetoric in Canada and the United States (2016)
are excellent books that recognize the roles that women have played in op-
posing abortion and the impact of arguing against abortion in the name of
protecting women. Women against Abortion is largely biographical, focus-
ing on a variety of US women who worked in so-called crisis pregnancy cen-
ters, staffed religious and secular “pro-life” organizations, participated in
direct-action attempts to close clinics, and committed acts of violence against
physicians who provided abortions. The Changing Voice of the Anti-abortion
Movement is a study of “pro-woman” rhetoric that shapes legislative reform
of abortion regulations and antiabortionists’ strategies. Both books success-
fully repaint the “traditional portrait” of antiabortionists by shifting focus
away from the scolding male zealot who typically gets portrayed in the news
(Saurette and Gordon 2016, 152).
What these two books lack is a larger, intersectional scope of how pro-
woman rhetoric is used to foster right-wing politics by way of, and beyond,
the fight over abortion. Putting a female front on politics meant to diminish
women’s political power is an old tactic of right-wing populism, European
fascism, and organized white supremacism in the United States. These po-
litical projects historically have cited protecting or advancing women as their
motive. Among the many new studies that examine conservative women
activists and politicians in the United States and around the world, Sara
I want to thank Leslie Reagan, Karen Petrone, Toby Beauchamp, Charlie Zhang, Chip
Berlet, Robin Marty, Jenn Hunt, and the editorial team of Signs for leads and insights. I am
also grateful for funds from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky,
which allowed for research assistance provided by Kyle Eveleth and Rory Barron.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019, vol. 44, no. 3]
© 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2019/4403-0006$10.00
This content downloaded from 137.111.162.020 on February 19, 2019 16:10:09 PM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
666 y Mason
Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism ex-

plains how the theme of gender equality “become[s] the common currency
in the name of which new racist and imperialist configurations of power be-
come hegemonic.” This book recognizes not only how the idea of gender
equality “can quite easily be used opportunistically” by right-wing forces to
gain political power and cultural capital but also how this opportunism is
currently being deployed by neoliberal states, female politicians, and wom-
en’s organizations in a way that consigns migrant (especially Muslim) women
to the social reproduction that those politicians and organizations have his-
torically sought to avoid themselves (Farris 2017, 8). Farris’s intersectional
approach to the trend of right-wing politics deploying pro-woman rhetoric
assumes that gendered politics are always also racial and colonialist politics.
This assumption is shared by feminists who for more than twenty-five years
have merged reproductive rights and social justice perspectives to challenge
and expand the terms of the abortion debate. Inspired by Farris’s study
and by the generations of reproductive justice scholars and activists who have
done such expansive work for decades, this article examines the pro-woman
impulse of antiabortion politics in a transnational and intersectional frame-
work.
We should not view the pro-woman stances against abortion dismissively,
as only a matter of cynical political opportunism, or naively, as earnest polit-
ical or moral expression by conservative, Catholic, and evangelical Christian
women. It is important to consider the cultural work as well as the political
gains achieved by arguing against abortion in the name of women’s rights. For
example, it broadens our scope to see this current championing of women and
womanhood in the historical context and cultural moment in which these
concepts, on the one hand, are complicated by transgender and other mem-
bers of the LGBTQ community and, on the other, are exalted by conservative
Christians who see womanhood as an institution besieged by transgender and
gender-nonconforming people. In October 2015, a gathering billed as the
“first-ever evangelical conference on transgender issues” was cosponsored
by the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the name of which
exemplifies the religious Right’s territorializing of gender—understood as
the binary of manhood and womanhood—as a specifically Christian property
(Smith 2015). To protect this property of womanhood, policies regarding
the gendered use of public toilets proliferated after the 2015 conference.
In the name of protecting girls and women, campaigns for “bathroom bills”
and for pro-woman antiabortion bills alike depict predators preying specifi-
cally on white women and girls. In public toilets, white women and girls are
portrayed as being victimized by sexual predators (Beauchamp 2018). In
abortion clinics, white women and girls are portrayed as being victimized by
all sorts of predators—moral, financial, sexual, racial, Semitic, and satanic—

S I G N S Spring 2019 y 667
or a conglomeration of all of these (Mason 2002, 158–86; Saurette and Gor-

don 2016, 260). While US campaigns that claim to want to protect black
women and black “unborn” babies from abortion emerge intermittently, es-
pecially during elections in hopes of splitting the African American vote
(Joyce 2010), by and large the so-called victims of abortion (when not exclu-
sively seen as the so-called unborn) are depicted visually as white women or
statistically as “women,” the universal category that is understood by default
to be white (Saurette and Gordon 2016, 260, 285). The understood white-
ness of these women who supposedly need protection is important to consider.
As with other right-wing movements worldwide and historically, US
antiabortion rhetoric increasingly redeploys colonial and civilizational nar-
ratives about white women as victims. As victims of abortion as a medical
procedure, women purportedly suffer postabortion mental illness or physi-
cal disease allegedly caused by terminating pregnancies. As victims of an
abortion “industry,” white women purportedly suffer sexual abuse and fi-
nancial exploitation at the hands of doctors and clinic personnel. Such nar-
ratives depicting white women as dupes of a sordid, satanic system of abor-
tion provision ignore the fact that most women report feeling relief—not
grief, regret, or trauma—after terminating an unwanted pregnancy (Sanger
2017). These narratives thus follow a “tendency to monopolize and capital-
ize on victimhood” whenever “whiteness feminizes” (Chow 2002, 179). To
get a sense of the political and cultural influence that right-wing movements
gain when they play the woman card, we can trace the transnational traffic
among antiabortion personnel, funds, and tactics. When we read “represen-
tations of ‘woman’ cross-culturally by foregrounding the issue of ethnicity—
including the ethnicity of whiteness”—we can explore the “racialist hold on
victimhood itself as cultural capital” (Chow 2002, 179). This article thus an-
alyzes representations of women as victims of abortion, focusing on three
countries where national identity is especially bound up with whiteness
and where abortion has been particularly contested: Ireland, Russia, and
the United States. In so doing, I hope to illuminate how transnational anti-
abortion work plays a role in the global rise of the Right that characterizes the
contemporary moment.
So far, antiabortion politics have received little attention in analyses that
have tried to account for the surprise election of Donald Trump in the United
States, the unexpected vote by the British to exit the European Union, the
unanticipated embrace of Marine LePen as a French presidential candidate
in 2017, and the political triumph of populists and the far Right in 2018 in
Italy (to name but a few indicators of a global rise of the Right). In fact, a re-
cent study decentered the role of abortion in the history of conservatism’s rise
in the United States, suggesting that instead of abortion it actually was racism
that shaped the forces of the New Right and the Reagan revolution (Balmer

668 y Mason
2014). This study ignored and effectively undid (in the eyes of the media) inter-
sectional analyses of abortion politics as profoundly imbued with racial impli-
cations and historically inextricable from racial politics (e.g., Roberts 1998).
While the politics of gender were front and center in the aftermath of Hillary
Clinton’s defeat by a self-described pussy-grabber, no one has compared strat-
egy and tactics between antiabortion militants and the alt-right, even though
their campus activities resemble each other. No one has considered how the
mass hoaxes, media manipulation and harassment, and “fake news” of the
Trump era were all presaged by the scare tactics, faux documentaries, and
doxing practices of militant antiabortionists. By looking at “pro-woman” op-
position to abortion in a transnational light, this article attempts to fill in
some of these gaps in inquiry and invites others to further the investigation.
What follows is a three-part examination. First I consider how antiabor-
tionists comprising a nonmilitant global pro-life network export their mes-
sage and embrace a rationalist discourse in which the state is good and useful
and passing legislation is a goal. This first part of this article briefly examines
the global network of Catholic pro-life enterprises before focusing on one
case study of the US Right exporting its antiabortion ideas and strategies
to Ireland. The second part focuses on exchanges between Russian and Amer-
ican abortion opponents. This transnational relationship was also developed
with the purpose of “protecting” women from abortion, as in Ireland. In ad-
dition, it features a temporal element, a sense of time running out, which
resembles antiabortion militancy with white supremacist underpinnings. Ar-
guing that outlawing abortion is necessary to avoid losing political and cul-
tural dominance, some Russian antiabortionists reveal how their devotion to
women is undergirded by white supremacist fears and ambitions to expand
their political power across national boundaries. Such militant stances against
abortion, as opposed to the global pro-life movement, have increasingly em-
braced a nonrationalist discourse, as we see in the US context, which com-
prises the final third of my analysis. This discussion examines how militant
antiabortionists in the United States reject the goal of incremental legislative
reform and continue a long-standing rhetorical strategy of what we now call
“fake news.”
Rights-based rhetoric in Ireland

Many US-based efforts to spread antiabortion messages abroad feature pro-
life and right-to-life rhetoric.1 Right-to-life arguments are a rationalist dis-
1
In Killing for Life, I distinguish between right-to-life rhetoric and pro-life culture to show
that different notions of equality and creation came into play as cultural conservatism began to

course seeking to secure rights, through legislative reform, for the variety
of products of pregnancy that have been reified as “the unborn,” “the pre-
born,” or prenatal “life itself.” Despite doctrinal and denominational differ-
ences among religious stances against abortion, right-to-life rhetoric emerged
in the 1960s and 1970s as a means to consolidate antiabortionists. We can see
attempts to promote the right-to-life stance abroad as part of a larger effort to
export right-wing Christianity throughout the second half of the twentieth
century, when many Christian conservatives shifted from missionary work
to politics (Hardisty and Berlet 2014). The variety of Roman Catholic orga-
nizations devoted to international action include Human Life International.
Founder Paul Marx was explicit in his anti-Semitic apocalypticism, which de-
rided “pro-abortion Jews” and the “pro-abortion medical professors who are
Jewish” as “death peddlers” who were ushering in a “new holocaust” against
“the unborn” (in Mason 2002, 172). Another prominent Catholic organi-
zation is the Apostles of Jesus, whose work in “more than 30 dioceses in
Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, South Africa, Djibouti and Ethiopia” car-
ries on a colonialist legacy of “civilizing” the supposed barbaric sexuality of
the so-called Dark Continent (Hardisty and Berlet 2014). Examining recent
antiabortion work in Ireland illustrates how US-based efforts to create a global
pro-life network rely on rationalist discourse, embrace the state as an ally, and
aim primarily for legislative reform seeking to criminalize abortion or reduce
access to it.
In 1983, Ireland passed a constitutional amendment (the Eighth Amend-
ment, or Article 40.3.3) that quintessentially asserted a right-to-life argu-
ment: “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and with due
regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect,
and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”2 Op-
position ensued over the years, and by 1992 the Supreme Court recognized
dominate in the last quarter of the twentieth century (Mason 2002, 9–45). This historical and
discursive shift reflects what, at the turn of the millennium, scholars such as Linda Kintz (1997)
called “the emotions that matter” and what scholars currently explore as affect. Killing for Life
also elucidates how different kinds of pro-life writing exploit the indeterminacy of the term
“life” instead of agreeing on an absolute meaning of it (Mason 2002, 162–71, 186). This em-
brace of indeterminacy, relativism, and equivocation, which conservatives previously rejected
as a liberal pathology while expounding the virtues of absolute truth, is found in other elements
of right-wing literature in America (Mason 2018) and presages the postfactualism of the Trump
era (Parker, Meyer, and Buckley 2019).
2
Eighth Amendment of the Constitution Act 1983 (Ir.), http://www.irishstatutebook.ie
/eli/1983/ca/8/enacted/en/html.

670 y Mason
women’s health as an important factor to consider. That decision was further

condoned and codified in 2013 with the Protection of Life during Pregnancy
Act, which kept abortion a crime unless the pregnant woman’s life was at
risk. In 2017, a Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment continued this
line of argument and recommended that Article 40.3.3 be repealed in a refer-
endum planned for 2018. As the right-to-life argument swung in favor of the
right of women to terminate pregnancies that might kill them if continued,
abortion opposition began to focus, too, on women’s health, a tactic that
never lost sight of the rationalist approach of swaying lawmakers and voters.
In May 2018, Ireland overturned the Eighth Amendment in a historic victory
for abortion rights advocates. Consequently, Ireland became aligned more
than ever with the liberal-secular consensus of Western countries, even as
“elsewhere that consensus is under sudden strain and threat” (Douthat 2018).
Reports about the 2018 referendum on the Eighth Amendment illumi-
nate how US antiabortionists sought to influence Irish voters. According to
the New York Times, American youth funded by antiabortion organizations
and professional “pro-life” advocates traveled overseas to sway people in pub-
lic and in person. The arguments deployed avoided religious sentiment and
instead turned “to arguments that abortion harms women’s health. They
are also turning to social media tools” (O’Loughlin 2018). There were online
campaigns that strived to subvert Ireland’s rules against political advertising
on television and radio. A Washington, DC–based “firm that has developed
apps for the Trump campaign, the National Rifle Association, the Republican
National Committee and Vote Leave,” which encouraged the British to exit
the European Union, was also retained by Ireland’s antiabortion campaigns.
Those who tracked the ads recognized that the opportunity to influence vot-
ers through unregulated social media represented a “serious vulnerability in
our democratic system” (O’Loughlin 2018). The result was an onslaught
of Facebook ads in favor of retaining the Eighth Amendment. Most of the
advertisers were from the United States; the names of the organizations
and their slogans attest to the focus on opposing abortion to protect women
and mothers. For example, “one of the American groups is called Expectant
Mother Care,” and the American antiabortion organization Live Action cre-
ated a hashtag #WomenBetrayed to campaign against the repeal (Provost
and Whyte 2018). This level of influence by US antiabortionists deploying
pro-woman rhetoric in Ireland was a digitalized acceleration of decades of
importing American antiabortion personnel who increasingly played the
woman card.
As the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act was being debated in Ire-
land, abortion foes hosted a 2012 International Symposium on Maternal

Health, thereby emphasizing women’s well-being instead of saving fetuses.3

One result was the creation of “The Dublin Declaration on Maternal Health-
care,” which argues that there is never any medical reason that justifies abor-
tion. Based on “junk science,” this declaration contradicts the established
worldwide data that demonstrate how maternal mortality rates go up when
abortion is criminalized (Morgan 2017). Moreover, the Dublin Declaration
has been a boon to the “global expansion and consolidation of Catholic
health care facilities” and has proven effective in Latin America, especially
in El Salvador and Chile (Morgan 2017). Another result of the 2012 interna-
tional symposium was the importation of American speakers, one of whom,
Priscilla Coleman, writes academic studies perpetuating the idea that abor-
tion psychologically harms women. As suspect as the Dublin Declaration
on Maternal Healthcare, Coleman’s studies rely on medical misinformation
and flawed methodology to achieve their results (Dreweke 2012). Coleman
returned to Ireland in 2017 to speak at a conference hosted by Human Life
International. In addition to Coleman, the conference featured Abby John-
son, the former director of a Texas Planned Parenthood clinic who decided
that she was pro-life. Throughout the process, American women were at
the forefront of fending off efforts to repeal the amendment criminalizing
abortion in Ireland.
On the one hand, these US speakers were following a well-trod path made
by American abortion foes to Ireland and back. Americans United for Life
(AUL) boasts about their impact on Ireland beginning decades ago: “In
1979, AUL played a pivotal role in amending the Irish Constitution to pro-
tect life by precluding abortion.” Later, when Ireland’s “pro-life constitution
was challenged before the European Court of Human Rights,” AUL again
“served as a consultant” and continued to do so throughout the efforts to re-
scind the Eighth Amendment (2018, 471). In addition, Joe Scheidler of Pro-
life Action League has long been influential in exporting militant tactics to
Youth Defence—Ireland’s major antiabortion organization, which has been
linked to far-right movements in Europe—by speaking at its conferences and
bringing its speakers to the United States (Marty 2015; O’Loughlin 2018).
Scheidler’s tactics promote the kind of aggressive behavior that ushered in
the “direct action” militancy that emerged in the United States in the
1980s and 1990s. His book Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion (1985) remains
a how-to manual for militants who want to drive reproductive health care
workers out of business through harassment and deter women seeking abor-
3
Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 (Act No. 35/2013) (Ir.), http://www
.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2013/act/35/enacted/en/print.

672 y Mason
tions through scare tactics and shaming (Marty 2015). On the other hand,
Coleman and Johnson, as women, diminished the reputation the pro-life
movement has for such shaming and misogyny. Their claim to oppose abor-
tion for the sake of women’s protection and well-being represents the way to-
day’s rationalist right-to-life argument portrays women as victims of an abor-
tion industry.
Abby Johnson’s work illustrates this point. Johnson was associated with
Planned Parenthood for eight years, first as a volunteer clinic escort and ul-
timately as the director of a clinic in Texas. She made headlines when she
very publicly converted to the “other side,” a conversion that coincided
with a tactic called “40 Days for Life.” Presented as an innovation in prayer
service, the forty days of prayer, which stationed at least two antiabortionists
outside the clinic where Johnson worked every hour of the day for over a
month, was an established tactic of surveillance and intimidation (Johnson
2010; Saurette and Gordon 2016, 179–80). The relentlessness was espe-
cially intimidating because just four months earlier, on May 31, 2009, Kan-
sas physician George Tiller was murdered by an antiabortionist with con-
nections to both Operation Rescue and the 1990s-era militia movement.
In the midst of these forty days of clinic harassment, according to her 2010
book Unplanned, Johnson was asked to help a physician in her clinic with
an ultrasound-guided abortion. Viewing this abortion was a revelation and
the catalyst for her conversion, Johnson maintains, which seems incredible
given her position as the director of the clinic and given that ultrasounds prior
to abortions are standard procedure (Marcotte 2010). This dramatic re-
sponse to the ultrasound echoes the gothic description offered in The Silent
Scream, a 1984 film that used the then-novel technology of ultrasound to
show “the truth” of abortion (Valerius 2013). Johnson also maintains that
her gradual “discovery of Planned Parenthood’s revenue agenda” (121)
and its “money-first attitude toward abortion, especially late-term abortions”
(121) led to her claim that women are “victims” (137) of proabortion prof-
iteers who seek to exploit them for financial and political gain.
Johnson’s Unplanned resonates resoundingly with Won by Love: Norma
McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, Speaks Out for the Unborn as She Shares
Her New Conviction for Life, the 1997 memoir detailing McCorvey’s very
public conversion to pro-life Christianity after working at an abortion clinic.
According to the books, both women experience a miraculous conversion
after antiabortion Christians opened offices adjacent to the clinics where
they worked. Both authors make the same claims about the so-called abor-
tion industry: it is duplicitous, unclean, profiteering, and jeopardizes wom-
en’s health (McCorvey 1997; Johnson 2010, 2018). Johnson’s story follows
a rhetorical strategy that goes back to the 1970s—as Haugeberg’s (2017)

work on women against abortion attests—but that was systematized in the

1990s.
Saurette and Gordon (2016, 299) trace the proliferation of pro-woman
rhetoric to the mid-1990s, overlooking an important source. In 1992, Life
Dynamics founder Mark Crutcher promoted the idea of appearing to work
on behalf of women while opposing abortion in an influential underground
manual called Firestorm: A Guerrilla Strategy for a Pro-life America. He
writes that abortion rights advocates “are evidently so accustomed to our
arguments being focused only on the unborn baby, for us to voluntarily talk
about the woman catches them totally off-guard” (75). Consequently he
recommends that “legislation should be sold as ‘pro-women’ and/or ‘con-
sumer protection’ legislation” (59). Moreover, Firestorm, which lays out a
legislative and activist plan for all fifty states, insists that “in all cases make
sure the person delivering the message [in court] is female” (70). Crutcher’s
Firestorm and McCorvey’s memoir indicate that Johnson’s memoir and her
conversion are reboots of tactics first deployed systematically in the 1990s.
It is this approach to opposing abortion—the tactic of supposedly pro-
tecting women against deceptive exploiters—that Johnson lent to Irish ef-
forts to retain the criminalization of abortion in December 2017 (Mac
Donald 2017). At a conference meant to bolster support for retaining the
Eighth Amendment, she said, “abortion can never be safe,” either for the
“unborn children” or “their mothers,” thereby reinforcing the message that
Priscilla Coleman had voiced just months earlier at a Human Life Interna-
tional conference in Dublin on the supposedly deleterious effects of abor-
tion on women (HLI Staff 2017). The messages exported by Catholic
Americans Abby Johnson and Priscilla Coleman function to expand the
antiabortion rights-based rhetoric from the “unborn” to women.
In the face of unprecedented support for repealing the Eighth Amend-
ment, this appeal to women as health-care consumers blends easily with
the traditional association of women as mothers of the nation. Throughout
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, according to historians such as
Cara Delay, Irish women have experienced a loss of national belonging
when they cross the border to obtain an abortion. The continuity of wom-
en’s experience in Irish history is exploited by the purportedly pro-woman
approach delivered by Coleman and Johnson on behalf of Human Life In-
ternational—an approach that could only exacerbate women’s feeling alien-
ated from their country “because they chose abortion over the national ideal
of motherhood” (Delay 2019). This international traffic in gender-based
antiabortion work preserves and promotes Irish nationalism, embracing the
state and lawmakers at the expense of women. It also reflects the femo-
nationalism operating in France, Italy, and the Netherlands—a form of na-

674 y Mason
tionalism that forwards right-wing agendas in the name of women’s rights

(Farris 2017).
Especially in its sustained formulation of the abortion debate as a “clash
of absolutes” (Tribe 1992), the international efforts by US-based abortion
opponents resemble femonationalism, which relies on a Manichean division
of foes and forecloses any intersectional approach to abortion as a matter of
broader reproductive health justice. According to Farris, “by encouraging a
rhetoric of division, or a Manichean splitting of the political and ideological
debate into one counterposing ‘Us’ (white, European, western, Christian, civ-
ilized, ‘women-friendly’) to ‘Them’ (nonwhite, non-European, non-western,
Muslim, un-civilized, misogynist Others), right-wing nationalist parties have
everything to gain” (2017, 8) This narrative framing so currently evident
among right-wing nationalists in a variety of countries has structured abor-
tion politics for decades, especially in its racialized rhetoric.4
As previous research demonstrates, the Manichean narrative framing of
abortion politics reveals the ideological intersections among antiabortion
militants, far-right agitators (such as the militia movement and organized
white supremacists), and secular or religious right-to-life organizations (Ma-
son 2002, 99–157). Through this framing of absolute opponents, antiabor-
tion writings from all factions of pro-life politics promoted the fight against
abortion as an apocalyptic narrative that operated in secular as well as sacred
registers but found its most vociferous manifestation in antiabortion violence
and “pro-life” murders (Mason 2002). These murders were often imbued
with anti-Semitism and undergirded by racialist sentiment (Mason 2002).
Many of the US abortion militants who committed homicide in the name
of “life” were Holocaust deniers even as they decried the so-called holocaust
of the unborn, which they also likened to slavery and genocide, as we will see
below. The racialist underpinnings of their writings and speech were bound
4
In considering the cultural work of antiabortion politics as a matter of narrative, I follow
the work of narratologists who see narrative as a system of meaning rather than a formal struc-
ture. This approach is different from (but often compatible with) literary scholars who consider
antiabortion material in light of generic conventions of a particular kind of story, such as the
gothic, and sociologists who consider antiabortion rhetoric as social scripts or narrative framing
(e.g., Valerius 2013; Saurette and Gordon 2016, 271–91). In addition to these approaches,
a narratological approach recognizes the malleability and variability of narrative as a post-
structural system of meaning (Roof 2015) as well as the affective articulation of identificatory
subjectivities that result when cultural logics interpellate readers as players in social dramas
(Currie 1998; Mason 2002). In other words, I consider the affective “ability of narrative to
forge rather than simply reflect agency,” social identity, and political action (Warhol and Lanser
2015, 6).

up with the apocalyptic narrative that structured the issue not only as a Man-
ichean conflict between absolute enemies but also as a matter of running out
of time and racing toward a cataclysmic end. This apocalyptic sense of anti-
abortion discourse has been exported from the United States to Russia since
the mid-1990s.
Running out of time in Russia

Unlike Ireland, where politics have been so entrenched in Catholicism that
women have consistently perceived terminating pregnancies as tantamount
to terminating their national belonging, Russia has a complicated past re-
garding abortion. The Soviet Union led the world in decriminalizing abor-
tion in 1920. A little more than a decade later, however, the Soviet govern-
ment banned it. By 1955 it was decriminalized again. But the conditions
under which women terminated pregnancy in the mid-twentieth-century
USSR were awful: “Considering abortion an undesirable social practice,
state officials gave no thought to women’s comfort during the procedure,”
which sometimes was done without anesthesia, without privacy, and with
the attitude that women need to suffer for relinquishing motherhood
(Rivkin-Fish 2013, 573). Unlike the American decriminalization of abor-
tion in 1973, Nikita Khrushchev’s relegalization of it in 1955 was not so
clearly a win for Soviet women, especially since it was the primary method
of fertility control, as barrier methods of contraception were not produced
or encouraged. Consequently, unlike abortion in the United States, abor-
tion in Russia was nearly a universal experience for women, a necessity rather
than the choice of self-determined women (Rivkin-Fish 2013; Luehrmann
2016).
Much of the discourse determining these changes focused on demo-
graphics. Anthropologist Michele Rivkin-Fish (2003, 290) has traced the
subtleties in language and argument regarding birth rates to provide a ge-
nealogy of the “demographic crisis” in Russia. Throughout the twentieth
century, “fertility analysis has been used in national political struggles in Rus-
sia” (289), and anxiety over a diminishing birth rate returned with a ven-
geance in the 1990s, when attempts to curtail access to abortion resumed
with new determination as a “postsocialist panic” (293). Especially after the
Soviet collapse and the ascendance of the Russian Orthodox Church, imports
of US antiabortion tactics and rhetoric have aided Russian attempts to
thwart abortion as a supposed cause of demographic demise: “From the be-
ginning of the 1990s, Russian nationalists seized on abortion and contra-
ceptives as insidious practices contributing to the nation’s low fertility and
rapidly decreasing population” (Rivkin-Fish 2013, 573; see also 2003).

676 y Mason
Rivkin-Fish’s analyses do not detail how the global antiabortion movement,

led by the United States, provided ongoing support since the 1990s.
Beginning in 1995 with the founding of the World Congress of Families
in Moscow, right-wing US evangelicals have worked to persuade Russians
to adopt tactics such as mandating waiting periods ranging from forty-eight
hours to a week and counseling sessions that include ultrasounds (Kishkovsky
2011). These mandates entail familiar scare tactics such as claiming that
abortion causes infertility. While there has been an increase in “American style
pickets of abortion clinics” and “graphic web sites, posters and leaflets [that]
are supplemented with sweeping references to Russian history,” the most in-
sidious of innovations has been the Russian adoption of what we in the United
States call “crisis pregnancy centers” (Kishkovsky 2011). These centers have
emerged in Russia as places to support women by providing counseling,
temporary housing, and sometimes job training (Parogni 2016). But like
their US counterparts, their offers of aid, comfort, training, or donations
come with scare tactics designed to sway the woman not to terminate her
pregnancy and designed to look like scientific evidence when it actually is bi-
ased information, often delivered by psychologists paid for with antiabortion
money (Parogni 2016; Haugeberg 2017, 45–49).
These tactics reflect the pro-woman campaigns in Ireland and the United
States. But who is paying for them? The financial and institutional links
among American and Russian antiabortionists demonstrate a transnational
web of networking that makes it difficult to tell who is profiting from the
political power or money transfers that circulate through churches, nongov-
ernmental organizations, and nonprofit antiabortion organizations. Espe-
cially through the World Congress of Families (WCF), some of the “most
powerful organizations in America’s religious Right, including Concerned
Women for America, Focus on the Family, and Americans United for Life,”
have brought their homophobic and antiabortion influence to Russia (Le-
vintova 2014b, 2014c). The WCF was founded in 1995 by Allan Carlson,
an American professor and manager of the Howard Center for Family, Re-
ligion, and Society in Illinois, and Anatoly Antonov, a sociologist specializ-
ing in demographics at Moscow State University. Their collaborations and
yearly WCF demographic conferences helped shape late twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century Russian attitudes and policies that opposed abortion
under the guise of protecting women.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, two initiatives—the “ma-
ternity capital program” that provided “financial bonuses to women giving
birth to two children or more” and guidelines on how mandated preabortion
counseling was to be administered—emphasized the purported harms of
abortion to Russian women (Parogni 2016). Maternity capital harkened back

to “socialist ideals that the state should bear some of the burden of raising
children” (Rivkin-Fish 2013, 585; see also Rivkin-Fish 2010), but it para-
doxically provided material support only if the woman increases her family’s
material need by having another baby. Groups such as the Sanctity of Mother-
hood Program and the Patriarch’s Commission on the Family and Protec-
tion of Motherhood and Childhood carried forward the idea that fighting
abortion should be seen as a matter of protecting women. But these state-
run programs did not provide funds for preabortion counseling, and the ma-
ternity centers that were mandated to offer such counseling consequently
relied on outside money tied to “deeper collaboration” with anti-abortion
groups, some from the United States (Parogni 2016).
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, those collaborations in-
creased. In 2010, the managing director of the WCF, Larry Jacobs, “held
dozens of meetings with Russian policymakers and leaders” (HRC 2015,
12), including a Russian antiabortionist who the following year visited Dal-
las, Texas, as guest of an oilman with ties both to Russia and to Koch Indus-
tries, the influential US oil and gas company (Kishkovsky 2011): “A pack-
age of anti-abortion laws—the first new anti-choice laws in Russia since the
fall of the Soviet Union” followed in 2011, accompanied by companion leg-
islation outlawing gay “propaganda” (HRC 2015, 13). Policy makers re-
sponsible for this legislation met multiple times with WCF’s director Jacobs.
One of them served on the planning committee for the eighth WCF confer-
ence, which was rebranded after Russia annexed Crimea and the United
States imposed “economic sanctions against many Russian leaders, includ-
ing two major backers of WCF” in 2014 (HRC 2015, 14; see also Levin-
tova 2014a).
By 2015 symposia focusing on fetal pain and maternal trauma featured
American scientists such as Maureen Condic, a professor of neurobiology
at the University of Utah, and attracted attendees from twelve different
countries and a hundred cities (Jalsevac 2015). A year later, in 2016, anti-
abortionists convened a “For Life festival, an annual gathering of Russian
activists and international guests involved in the global fight against abor-
tion” (Parogni 2016). As a result of this convention, For Life became an
umbrella organization for more than four hundred antiabortion entities,
consolidating power to push for a ban on abortion and to persuade women
to reject the practice of abortion until it is banned (Parogni 2016). Russia’s
pronatalist nationalism relies on a transnational movement of US funds, per-
sonnel, and tactics.
In light of the investigations into Russian interference into the US pres-
idential election of 2016, we should ask how much antiabortion organiza-
tions in Russia and the United States are part of the transnational finances

678 y Mason
that shape oligarchies, right-wing movements, and the Trump-Pence ad-

ministration. Three years before Trump shocked the American public by
consistently praising Vladimir Putin while campaigning, WCF managing
director Larry Jacobs explained that “for 70 years we fought the commu-
nists, and some conservatives still associate Russia with a far left communist
country, when the reality is, among the more powerful nations, Russia is
one of the most conservative countries in the world” (in Young 2013).
Claiming “Russia could be a great ally for conservatives, on issues like de-
fending the family, abortions, even strengthening marriage and promoting
more children” (Young 2013), Jacobs and WCF founder Allan Carlson
have “built strong relationships” with influential Russian oligarchs and pol-
icy makers, one of whom operated in Italy as a representative of the WCF,
rubbing elbows with prominent far-right members of the Netherlands’
Party for Freedom, France’s National Front, and Italy’s Northern League
(Shekhovtsov 2018, 180). In Italy, politician Luca Volonte, who received
the “Family and Truth” award from Americans United for Life, was charged
with laundering bribes through various organizations, including an antiabor-
tion organization that supported Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s “video ad-
dress inside the Vatican” (Feder and Nardelli 2017). While issues of money
laundering through pro-life organizations remain unproven, the pronatalist
messaging shared by far-right populists and transnational antiabortionists
consistently strikes an apocalyptic tone and fuels the white supremacism of
the global Right.
In Russia, partners of WFC such as Archpriest Dimitri Smirnov, the top
Orthodox official and chairman of the Patriarchal Commission on Family
Matters and the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood, has sounded
an alarm of apocalyptic proportions. “There is very little time left until the
death of the entire Christian Civilization,” he claimed. “Several decades,”
he predicted, “perhaps 30 years, well, maybe in Russia it will last 50, no lon-
ger” (CBN 2017; MEMRI 2017). Structuring the political and moral di-
lemma of abortion in this way is a means of manufacturing a sense of time
running out, creating a sense of urgency to act, lest the nation be lost. But lost
to what or to whom?
Because atheism was state policy in the Soviet Union, the scare tactic of
saving the soul of the nation before the return of Jesus Christ was unlikely
to work as it has among evangelicals in the United States. But since the
1990s, that atheism has come under fire as President Putin has overseen a
“clericalization of Russia” in which speaking out against religion or religios-
ity has been outlawed (Chikov 2017). The exact content of the apocalyptic,
nearly no-time-left narrative that structures US pro-life politics is unlikely to
influence Russian people, but the deployment of its temporality appears to

be highly effective. The narrative in Russia is therefore not that God will lift
His veil of protection if citizens do not stop the “national sin” of abortion,
as it has been among US evangelicals. Instead, the contemporary Russian
antiabortion narrative is about losing the nation to those who may outbreed
the Russians; the apocalyptic narrative asserts that demographic decline,
brought about by abortion, will usher in a larger Muslim population and
the end of white civilization. During pro-life conferences sponsored by the
WCF in Moscow, “the high birth rate among Muslims in Russia was spoken
of with some awe, both as a threat and as something to emulate” (Parogni
2016). When we recall that the WCF was founded by a couple of professors
whose academic interest is demographics, we see that the fear of losing cul-
tural and political dominance has been an issue from the very beginning of
Russian-US antiabortion collaboration. In 1995, Antonov and his colleagues
were eager to discuss “Allan Carlson’s work on demographic changes in the
United States—work that claims feminism and homosexuality have led to
population decline, precipitating a crisis of the American family. Antonov
and Medkov saw the same thing happening in postcommunist Russia and felt
they had much to learn” (HRC 2015, 7). What they learned, and taught to
others, was how to shift a whole country from leftist to right-wing perspec-
tives on abortion. Putin seems to have heard this apocalyptic alarm of demo-
graphic demise; “Putin’s next target is Russian’s abortion culture,” according
to a 2017 report (Ferris-Rothman 2017).
Ethnographic studies illuminate what this targeting of abortion means
for Russian women. Depicting women as victims of abortion as well as sin-
ners, antiabortion activists in Russia have deployed the idea of postabortion
syndrome, which underscores the notion that women have suffered exploi-
tation by the state as well as having perpetrated state violence against the un-
born (Luehrmann 2016, 115). But in this formulation, opposition to abor-
tion is not argued in terms of murdering babies because historically the
unborn in Russia have not been imbued with individual, inherent rights,
as the more (classically liberal) right-to-life arguments insist in America
(Mason 2002, 16–17; Luehrmann 2016, 107). Because “the unborn foetus
as a rights-bearing person did not enter Soviet discourse,” the unborn in
Russia are more comparable to the unborn of pro-life conservative nation-
alism; they represent the collective future of a nation (Luehrmann 2016,
107; 2017; Mason 1999; 2002, 17–21). Russian women’s experiences of
expiating abortions reveal that “anxieties about demographic development
turn unborn children into symbols of a desired future” (Luehrmann 2016,
116). And, based on how male Russian antiabortionists talk about it, the
collective Russian unborn can also symbolize an undesired future, one that
is too Muslim.

680 y Mason
Constructing a pronatalist, pro-woman nationalism that argues against

abortion in the name of women’s rights, US-Russian collaborators have cre-
ated an antiabortion force that is also anti-Islamic. Saving the so-called un-
born becomes tantamount to saving women becomes tantamount to saving
the nation from Muslims lest “Russians . . . become an ethnic minority in
their own vast country” (Kishkovsky 2011). This widespread fear of becom-
ing an ethnic minority has characterized some antiabortion militants in the
United States, too (Mason 1999; Ferber 2003). In fact, we can see how
antiabortion rhetorical and tactical innovations from the 1990s set the po-
litical stage for a postfactual politics (Parker, Mayer, and Buckley 2019) and
how they have been updated to avoid overt misogyny, reject rationalist ar-
gument, rail against the state, and foment right-wing populism that tran-
scends national boundaries.
Postfactualism in the United States

Like right-to-life efforts in Ireland and apocalyptic pronatalist campaigns in
Russia, antiabortion work in the United States has increasingly adopted a pro-
woman approach since the 1990s. But the pro-woman approach among mil-
itant abortion foes in the United States eschews rights-based rhetoric and
instead embraces a postfactual discourse, in which “a lesser degree of truth-
fulness” is accepted and effective due to its affect—its emotional appeal
(Parker, Mayer, and Buckley 2019, 122). The pro-woman approach that mil-
itant antiabortionists in the United States employ actually revives tactics and
conspiracies that were seen as extreme in the 1990s: namely, the idea of fight-
ing abortion through “rescue” and the racial rhetoric of abolishing abortion
through direct action.
Consider, first, the pro-woman approach of the renewed rescue tactics in
the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s, the rescue movement was a mil-
itant attempt to physically block people’s path to clinic doors so they could
not enter the facility to perform or obtain the abortions scheduled for the
day. Antiabortionists considered their success a matter of rescuing the un-
born. Blockades ranged from people linking arms and standing in the way,
to parking cars in front of clinic doors, to mobilizations of hundreds of anti-
abortionists, the sheer number of whom was intimidating to clients, not to
mention the shaming hostility that they faced from the jeering crowd of pre-
dominantly white Christians reminiscent of lynch mobs. The 1994 Freedom
to Access Clinic Entrances (FACE) act quashed these tactics. Recently, how-
ever, the renewed rescue movement has turned from seeking to rescue the
unborn to rescuing the women in the clinic. Instead of blocking the doorway,
female antiabortion activists enter it like clients do and distribute roses to the

actual clients in the waiting room with the hope of dissuading them from go-
ing through with the scheduled procedure (Marty 2017). Once in, they re-
fuse to leave, claiming a right to stay because they are not blocking entrances.
This pro-woman approach to disrupting the operation of abortion clinics at-
tempts to skirt trespassing laws and FACE.
A companion effort and more militant revival of the rescue movement
was the July 2017 attempt to close Kentucky’s sole remaining abortion clinic,
the EMW Women’s Surgical Center. A male-dominated collaboration of
antiabortion organizations (including Missionaries to the Preborn, Opera-
tion Save America, and several local churches and groups) threatened not
only to “ignore Roe” but also to break the FACE law, which they depicted
as only one reason to disobey federal authority.5 This meant that hundreds
came to EMW in hopes of physically blocking access and preventing workers
and clients from entering. Ultimately, the antiabortionists could not prevail
against a buffer zone ordered by a federal judge; the clinic stayed open with
extra police protection against the weeklong antiabortion protest (Gandy
2017). Despite President Trump’s responsiveness to antiabortion directives
(Desanctis 2018), there was decidedly antigovernment sentiment among
the antiabortionists gathered in Louisville, who vowed to abolish abortion
and invoked a “doctrine of the lesser magistrate.”
The doctrine of the lesser magistrate, derived from Calvinist belief, pur-
portedly justifies illegal action to oppose abortion by citing precedents in
American history. The doctrine argues that “when the superior or higher
ranking civil authority makes immoral/unjust laws or policies, the lower
or lesser ranking civil authority has both a right and duty to refuse obedience
to that superior authority. If necessary, the lesser authorities may even actively
resist the higher authority” (Trewhella 2013). In 2013, Matthew Trewhella,
founder of Missionaries to the Preborn, self-published The Doctrine of the
Lesser Magistrates: A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of
Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government. Months before the Louisville ac-
tion, antiabortionist organizers met with pro-life Kentucky Governor Mat-
thew Bevin and presented him with Trewhella’s book: “Christians were re-
monstrating in Kentucky for months to encourage the state authorities to
cross a line, be brave, and defy the lawless, corrupt, and unconstitutional rul-
ing of Roe vs. Wade” (Thomas 2016). Thus, the organizers attempted to
provide state officials with a rationale to defy, and to let them defy, federal
laws in order to oppose abortion by impeding access to the clinic.
5
“Ignore Roe” was one of the slogans featured throughout the national event in Louis-
ville, Kentucky, organized by Operation Save America in 2017. The slogan appeared on t-shirts
sold by the organization: http://store.operationsaveamerica.org/product-p/such-time.htm.

682 y Mason
During the Louisville siege, Operation Save America also reached out to
police as state officials, hailing them as lesser magistrates. Writing directly to
law enforcement officers, leader Rusty Thomas (2016) argued that their
loyalty as officials of civil government rests foremost with God. Thomas also
appealed to officers’ sense of being “targeted” as a result of recent cam-
paigns to halt fatal police action against unarmed African Americans. With
thinly veiled references to the Black Lives Matter movement, the open letter
to police praised “THE THIN BLUE LINE that separates the criminal element
from society.” Thomas opined, “Anarchy runs rampant while government
tyranny grows. Our nation stands in awkward amazement as violence, car-
nage, terrorism, and massacres are becoming a common everyday experi-
ence in our nation. To our horror, this violence has now targeted our law
enforcement agencies” (2016). In this appeal, Thomas draws a distinct line
between the police and the tyrannical federal government, presumably in
hopes that police themselves would defy—or let the antiabortionists defy—
federal law.
Couched in historical examples of states’ uprisings against supposed fed-
eral tyranny, Trewhella’s Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates is similar in pur-
pose and tone to the Defensive Action Statement circulated in the 1990s
(Trewhella 2013). Penned by Paul Hill, who was later convicted of murder-
ing a physician and a clinic escort in 1994, the Defensive Action Statement
was a declaration by antiabortionists who agreed that homicides were justi-
fied if the intention was to oppose abortion (Risen and Thomas 1998, 347).
Trewhella was a signatory of the Defensive Action Statement in 1994.
Another prominent feature of the Louisville siege was the racialist rhet-
oric of abortion abolitionism. Founded by young white men, Abolish Hu-
man Abortion is touted as the new vanguard in opposing abortion (Carmon
2014). Its founders protest what they see as an incrementalist approach of
undoing women’s rights via regulatory legislation. To challenge the pro-life
establishment, Abolish Human Abortion unapologetically appropriates the
historical plight of enslaved Africans in America and claims to be pro-woman.
Adopting the language of social justice as a means to thwart racial oppres-
sion, the campaign deploys a claim of abortion as black genocide, invoking
the historical trauma of people of color who have endured centuries of sci-
entific and medical racism. The antiabortion movement has for years at-
tempted to win support from African Americans with materials in different
media, including comic books, video magazines, memes, so-called docu-
mentaries, campus tours, and bus tours (Joyce 2010). This race-based “scare
tactic,” as Kathryn Joyce (2010) has called it, becomes increasingly prominent
when racial politics are important to electoral races.

Beyond elections, the deployment of a specter of genocide should be seen

as part of a global effort to curtail abortion rights and demonize women of
color. Jennifer Denbow has demonstrated this in her analysis of abortion bans
proposed to stop terminations based on the race or sex of the fetus. Even as
they disavow eugenics, “supporters of race- and sex-selective abortion bans
paradoxically draw on and reproduce the notions of national purity and civ-
ilization that undergirded eugenic policies” (Denbow 2016, 605). Depicting
abortion as slavery, these bans are deemed necessary in order to uphold the
national culture and values of racial and gender equality: “Women of color,
therefore, emerge as a threat to the nation in their capacity to perpetuate anti-
American values and, as potential reproducers and carriers of innocent fetal
life, as essential to nation building” (605). Likewise, Asian women are de-
picted as the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of reproductive control.
Miriam Yeung, the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American
Women’s Forum, writes about this trend in response to the criminal cases
involving Purvi Patel and Bei Bei Shuai, who were prosecuted for alleged fe-
ticide in the state of Indiana in 2013 and 2011. These two cases signal a
growing criminalization of pregnant women, and Patel and Shui are among
the hundreds of women who have been arrested due to pregnancies that
have gone awry (Paltrow and Flavin 2013). Yeung states that cultural mis-
information and unsubstantiated “stories of infanticide in India . . . and
gender-based abortions in China . . . are influencing legislation and court-
rooms in the United States. As a result, states are adopting racially biased
‘sex-selective abortion’ bans, and laws like feticide, which were intended to
protect pregnant women, are being used to criminalize immigrants and Asian
Americans” (Yeung 2015; see also Mohanty 2012; Shanghai Daily 2014).
Thus, allegations of “gendercide” have gone hand in hand with claims of
abortion as genocide, all of which boil down to blaming the victims of re-
productive injustices—women of color in the United States and globally.
Blaming the victim also comes into play with abortion-as-holocaust memes,
which are paradoxically based on long-standing anti-Semitic tropes. Claims of
abortion as a holocaust have inspired the most lethal abortion foes who took
aim at doctors in the 1990s. Murderers who killed Dr. John Bayard Britton
and his escort James Barrett in 1994, killed and maimed Alabama clinic work-
ers in 1998, and fatally shot Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1999 all believed they were
halting a holocaust.6 This was especially ironic given that Dr. Slepian had just
6
The perpetrators were Paul Hill, Eric Rudolph, and Charles Kopp, each of whom repeated
racialized, apocalyptic rhetoric that situated themselves as defenders against a “holocaust” of
babies, not Jews.

684 y Mason
returned to his home from synagogue before being gunned down in his
kitchen. The perpetrator in Alabama had written a high school essay about
how, he claimed, the Nazi Holocaust of Jews was a hoax. While it may defy
common logic, Holocaust denial is paradoxically often an unspoken assump-
tion—and other times a blatant component—of claiming that abortion is a
holocaust (Mason 2002, 38– 44, 171–76).
These racial and religious references to genocide, slavery, and the Holo-
caust are not mere comparisons (Mason 2002, 118–27). Rather, they serve
to tell a story of human atrocities that lead up to abortion as an apocalyptic
culmination of human depravation (Mason 2002, 114–18). Abolish Hu-
man Abortion embraces and perpetuates this narrative in claiming, “the
abortion holocaust exceeds all previous atrocities practiced by the Western
World” (AHA 2017). The result is a generic diminishment (if not erasure) of
actual historical persecutions based on religion, race, sexuality, and gender.
Moreover, as with other right-wing discourses in which “history itself—the
distinctiveness of its multiple stages—is irrelevant during a time of Manichean
struggle between cultures” (Mihailovic 2015, 89), abolishing abortion be-
comes an epic battle not against actual people as historical agents but a
“war with the entire worldview that makes abortion legal in the first place”
(AHA 2017). Thus, the AHA’s home page declares, “Every age has its evils.
Every age has its abolitionists” (AHA 2017). This gamer-type declaration
casts the political battle over abortion as a Manichean narrative and generic
vision quest to quash evil.
In this theocratic vision quest, optics are all important. In sharp contrast
to their older counterparts who shame women with Bibles held aloft, AHA
activists style themselves as progressive hipsters, posturing as cool big broth-
ers to younger kids they recruit at high schools, which they consider to be
the front lines of the abortion wars, not clinics. Their posters, memes, and
websites rely on well-crafted graphic designs resembling the aesthetics of
tattoos. While their historical arguments comparing the medical practice
of abortion to the economic system of slavery are questioned even by some
antiabortionists (Van Maren 2014), the use of visual artifacts from nineteenth-
century abolitionist campaigns lends a veneer of historical authenticity to the
comparison. Relying on pictorial assertion rather than historical fact of any
relationship between antiabortion and antislavery campaigns, the AHA is de-
liberate in its choice of visual rhetoric (AHA n.d.). Just as it rejects the right-
to-life approach because it is believed to invite incrementalism instead of a
commitment to act to end abortion—“we are not pro-life”—the AHA re-
jects the soft-focus cuteness of baby images that populate “pro-life” materi-
als. Instead, the AHA designed a pictorial icon that links the initials A H A
in such a way that it resembles, in the eyes of some onlookers, the newer
incarnations of swastikas that are proliferating among white supremacist

groups (AHA n.d.). To some, the initials, assembled as a cross-hatched light-

ning bolt, resemble the German Wolfsangel (OllieGarkey 2012; AHA n.d.).
To some, that is, the look of efforts to abolish abortion feels a lot like Nazism.
The AHA’s optics of appearing to be pro-black, pro-woman, radically
upstart, and hipster cool are thus also read as white supremacist. By updat-
ing and proliferating the racial message that abortion is a matter of slavery
and genocide, white advocates of abolishing abortion do not always specify
which racial groups are the target of these imagined racial attacks. In this
way, antiabortionists who have rejected the goal of incremental legislative
reform and rationalist arguments about the right to life have redesigned
their look in ways that make them legible to a variety of factions of the
Right. Much like the polo-shirted, khakied alt-right, which has shunned
the white robes of the KKK and recrafted Nazi symbols into updated ico-
nography, the AHA appears on the surface to be more progressive than
its earlier counterparts. Especially in the digital age of social media, the
control of optics determines whose narrative is replicated, read, followed,
believed, and acted out. In other words, the control of optics determines
whose news—fake or not—has the most impact.
Antiabortionists were at the forefront of fake news in the 1990s. Mark
Crutcher, author of the underground manual Firestorm (1992), began pro-
ducing an impressive oeuvre of faux documentaries in the 1990s and in-
spired a new generation of antiabortion video activists. A young female
protégé of Crutcher’s named Lila Rose has (in collaboration with James
O’Keefe of Project Veritas) gone on to produce undercover video stings
as part of her Live Action organization (Joyce 2012). Live Action’s sup-
posed exposé of Planned Parenthood’s purported fetal trafficking in the
summer of 2015 updated Crutcher’s attempt to create panic about the sup-
posed “harvesting” of fetal “body parts” for the black market back in 2000
(Mason 2002, 174). In 2014, the year before Rose’s “video was released,
only one pro-life activist threatened to kill or harm an abortion provider.
In 2015, the year the video was released, the number of threats jumped
to 94, and a gunman killed 3 and injured 9 at a Colorado Springs Planned
Parenthood” (Haugeberg 2017, 143– 44). Like Rose’s attempt to smear
Planned Parenthood, right-wing efforts—led by Rose’s collaborator, James
O’Keefe—to smear the Association of Community Organizations for Re-
form Now (ACORN) contributed to the voter suppression that helped elect
President Trump (Minnite 2012). While political entities have always relied
on spin and propaganda of sorts, especially when it comes to elections, pro-
life faux documentaries that create moral outrage via supposed exposés and
documentaries can influence elections. These faux documentaries can be
seen as both a precursor to and a subgenre of the fake news that has prolif-
erated in the era of Trump, whose lies epitomize postfactual politics. Like

686 y Mason
films by Citizens United that defamed Hillary Clinton, these faux documen-
taries opposing abortion embrace a postfactual discourse that depends on
creating the feel of documentary film, historical analysis, and journalistic
exposé without actual facts or logical arguments (Krzych 2016; Parker,
Mayer, and Buckley 2019). The fact that a woman, Lila Rose, is one of the
producers underscores the pro-woman trend that characterizes antiabor-
tion work in the age of femonationalism (Farris 2017).
Conclusion: Pro-woman rhetoric, femonationalist reproduction,

and right-wing networks
Ireland’s recent fight to retain the Eighth Amendment demonstrates the
transnational work by antiabortion women. Antiabortion travel to Ireland
from the United States had its beginnings in the 1990s when policy and
rhetoric shifted in a systemic way to centralize “the woman” and “the mother”
rather than arguing on behalf of the fetus. Fighting to criminalize abortion as
a matter of maternal health and of opposing the exploitation of women be-
came a way for pro-life Irish women to assert their national belonging and
their place as mothers of the nation. And so, as Farris says, “the current mo-
bilization of gender equality and feminism as tools in the service of strength-
ening of nationalist and racist discourses should be regarded not simply as
‘ideological cover,’ in a negative and limited sense.” Instead, it is important
to see fighting against abortion in the name of protecting women as indica-
tive of the roles that women play in the economic, political, and “material
chain of production and reproduction” (Farris 2017, 182). Moreover, it
helps illuminate the “cultural capital of victimhood” as it is bound up with
populist nationalism, whiteness, and women (Chow 2002, 153–82). As the
analysis of Russia demonstrates, opposing abortion to protect women is not
merely a ploy by which right-wing misogynists seek to oppress women.
Rather, it is a political goal inspired by and integrated with the fear of becom-
ing an ethnic minority. Seeing themselves as victims of demographic demise
while protecting women as victims of abortion, white Christians in Russia
have worked to create right-wing networks in Europe and the United States.
This cross-cultural look at antiabortion collaboration reveals a transnational
traffic in tactics, personnel, and funds that fuels right-wing politics and ide-
ology. We therefore ignore the transnational and intersectional aspects of
antiabortion work at the risk of imperiling democracy around the world.
Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

University of Kentucky

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Carol Mason

Opposing Abortion to Protect Women:

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Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism ex-

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or a conglomeration of all of these (Mason 2002, 158–86; Saurette and Gor-

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Rights-based rhetoric in Ireland

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women’s health as an important factor to consider. That decision was further

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Health, thereby emphasizing women’s well-being instead of saving fetuses.3

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work on women against abortion attests—but that was systematized in the

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tionalism that forwards right-wing agendas in the name of women’s rights

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Running out of time in Russia

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Rivkin-Fish’s analyses do not detail how the global antiabortion movement,

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that shape oligarchies, right-wing movements, and the Trump-Pence ad-

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Constructing a pronatalist, pro-woman nationalism that argues against

Postfactualism in the United States

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Beyond elections, the deployment of a specter of genocide should be seen

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groups (AHA n.d.). To some, the initials, assembled as a cross-hatched light-

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Conclusion: Pro-woman rhetoric, femonationalist reproduction,

Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

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